Electives: Somatization and Group, Part II: Therapists’ Relational Stories
In Levine's article we see how her own analysis around her difficulties with her relationship with her younger son opened an analytic space with her patient Susan. How did her relational story facilitate the analytic process? Adrienne Harris has suggested that the analyst opened “access to unbearable affects,” together providing a safe enough environment to reveal Levine’s shame about her relationship with her son. Also, her analyst was able to hold Levine in her mind with acceptance and faith in her and her son so that Levine could contain him - from the inside - and help him put his experience into words.
Levine’s patient Susan also had problems with her own son. Levine initially was not aware of these difficulties because of projective identification, that is, being identified with Susan as a good mother doing the best she could for her son. When Susan revealed that she intended to abandon her son with his abusive father, Levine, by examining her subjective countertransference, was trying to understand this enactment. There was an intergenerational repetition of abandonment, shifting back and forth between the positions of mother and child, trying to create a transitional space of thirdness.
In presenting our case studies of our personal stories, we have in mind what the Barangers’ wrote: two persons remain unavoidably connected and complementary - neither member of the couple can be understood without the other.
Alkinoi’s Case Study:
My somatization was my pregnancy and I explore my countertransference in the here and now of the group. In this particular week, an enactment emerges which enabled me to reflect on my countertransference and connect with my somatic changes. My relational story hindered, initially, my capacity to engage deeply in the analytic process.
The material comes from the birth of the group (my first ever group) which was around the second month of my pregnancy - something that was not announced to the group members. Only my co-therapist and my supervisor knew. The birth of the group preceded the birth of my daughter, thus I was simultaneously pushing to stretch myself beyond my limits for both of my babies. During this early stage in therapy, the group was made up of two female co-therapists, and one male and seven additional female members. There were many “abortions” due to therapists’ anxiety.
The group at these first meetings is occupied with the subject of the omnipotent mother, their mother. The image was clear and vivid: she can do everything but she self-neglected and, at the same time, deprived. There is a split inside the omnipotent mother, inside the group (symbolic children- symbolic mothers) and inside my body as I was sharing it with my baby and my clients. During sessions I was feeling weak with strong somatizations, and with sleepless nights after the sessions. These symptoms were not related to my pregnancy but had to do with the group dynamics and the unmetabolized material of sessions, particularly that we were two novice group therapists.
I had the need to hide this difficulty from the group, whereas with individual clients I was more open and I had self-disclosed about my pregnancy. In the group I had to survive changes, and through projective identification I was identified with the omnipotent mother. Symbolic children were angry with their mother and with me. There were members saying that my interventions were not helpful while others attributed my interventions to my co-therapist, saying how wonderful and empathic she was. They were finding me distant, private, and withdrawn. I was feeling neglected and lonely, tired and discredited, and excluded. The enactment that woke me up, just as Levine wrote about with her client Susan, was when the male member at the end of the session - one day after his name day - complained that no one remembered his name day and complained he was feeling neglected, especially by Foteini. I was really surprised. It nearly pushed me out of my chair. At the beginning of that session I was the only one who acknowledged with wishes his name day, and he had totally forgotten it by the end of the hour.
What was happening that we couldn’t connect? What experiences had members placed inside my womb? Was I the Fairbairnian bad object? Although I was talking about my experience, I was not able to communicate empathetically with the members, the children of the group. And the other subgroup of mothers was describing similar experiences in their lives with what I was feeling in the here and now of the group.
Was there a part of me that had dissociated in order to protect my body? Definitely. A subgroup experienced intense somatic symptoms and others in the group struggled with autoimmune diseases and cancer. Did I feel protective of my child? At that time I was not aware of my difficulty to connect fully with my pregnancy. Not the happy side of pregnancy, but the particular side that has to do with more difficult feelings like loss, loss of uniqueness, even envy, as something foreign invaded my body, my life and my relationship with my husband. These were some of the difficulties with this new role as mother and at the same time with becoming a group therapist. There were feelings of shame as I struggled to be a good enough mother for both my baby and for our group, and I was failing. Who needed more support: the group? my baby? or myself? And what would my pregnancy evoke in the group?
According to Fairbairn (Armstrong-Perlman,1991) I was a blur object: I couldn’t respond with cohesion and consistency to their needs. A part of me was unavailable. Was I acting as their mothers? How did my pregnancy affect the group as a whole? I could understand that there was a blind spot for me: my pregnancy and my relationship with my own mother had affected the way I was responding to the group. As Bass says: the way we respond to our clients reveals a lot about us and our values. Until the enactment I had been pretending that my pregnancy was hidden and so could not affect the group. Also I had not been aware of my shame - riddled, bad self-representations.
- Alkinoi Lala
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